We welcome the increased emphasis across the NHS on improving mental health services, in particular for children and young people and the aim to see mental health on an equal footing with physical health. Mental health problems represent the largest single cause of disability in the UK, with a quarter of adults experiencing at least one mental health problem in any given year¹. We are committed to help reverse this trend.

• We run a MedTechBOOST programme in partnership with Judge Business School and local companies to support the development and mentoring of AI innovations to address mental health and ageing challenges.
• We also work closely with the NIHR-sponsored Applied Research Collaborative (ARC) to understand the needs of some of our most economically challenged areas and hardest to reach communities.
• We are supporting critical local and national innovations to improve access to care for people in crisis and most at risk.

The NHS target is for people with cancer to survive longer and 75% of cancers to be diagnosed and treated at stages 1 and 2 (currently its 50%). Earlier diagnosis is critical to meeting our survival ambition, as it means patients can receive treatment when there is a better chance of achieving a cure.

• We have identified potential solutions for early diagnosis and treatment and are trialling them in the NHS. This include a test that can be done in primary care to help detect oesophageal cancer without resorting to an endoscopy.
• We are working with world-leading research institutions and companies who are developing new targets, drugs and surgical methods to enable access to these innovations faster. We will also work with our region’s Cancer Alliance, clinicians, patients and innovators on data analysis to reduce waiting and treatment times

The science of genomics has huge potential to pinpoint the right treatment for an individual patient. Our region boasts world-leading science in this area.

We supported the use of a proprietary rare diseases diagnostic platform in one of our local Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs). We co-led a consortium in a successful bid for a grant from Health Data Research UK (HDR UK) to build a cloud-based platform to house secondary care data, genomic and imaging data for 1,600 patients with three rare diseases, all secured and anonymised so that it could be used for research to find new treatments for these diseases. We will continue to support selected innovations which explore the use of data to speed up the diagnosis and treatment of comparatively rare diseases.

Over the next decade the number of people aged over 85 is projected to increase from 1.3 million to 2 million in the UK. This presents a huge challenge to health and social care services. It is widely accepted that the solution rests in supporting the older population to age well, concentrating on enabling health regimes, supported by assistive technology as people become less mobile.

All of our priority areas are set in the context of the prevention and wellbeing agenda, as the future of our NHS will not be secured simply by improving our hospitals but by supporting patients and the public to manage their lives and health conditions through better understanding of the resources available to them, including technology.